Austin Kelmore
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austinkelmore.com
Austin Kelmore
@austinkelmore.com
4.3K followers 170 following 4.4K posts
Unionizing the games industry one person at a time. Cofounder and active member of @gameworkers.co.uk and @gameworkersolidarity.com.

Game worker, rock climber, cat hugger based in Glasgow, Scotland.

https://www.austinkelmore.com
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A picture of Nemik from Star Wars: Andor saying: "And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try."
November 10, 2025 at 7:02 PM
austinkelmore.com
I really do think this is true.

Rockstar leadership deciding to fire 30+ union workers and the workers deciding to fight back is going to be something we look back on as a turning point for our unionization effort.
Now, as IWGB and fired workers go on the offensive against Rockstar, Kelmore believes the Game Workers Union is entering a new phase of its relatively young life. "Prior to this happening, we haven't ever really had people standing outside of companies with IWGB banners and organizing in a very visible way,” he said. “But this has changed that. When companies do something like this, you can't just slink away and hide anymore. It's a very public thing. It helps give people confidence that they can stay, because they have nothing to lose. They've already been fired. So they can be very public and organize and fight back. I think we are slowly starting to go over the curve of completely hidden to more public actions, and I anticipate more of these in the near future, too."
November 10, 2025 at 6:25 PM
austinkelmore.com
I've been reading the latest book by @mskellymhayes.bsky.social which seems very apt right now considering... *gestures around* everything going on.
A blue book with a person in a pond with lilypads in a calm forest. The book is titled Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis - Edited by Kelly Hayes.
November 4, 2025 at 8:52 AM
austinkelmore.com
If anyone is in or around Glasgow on Saturday and wants to hear me talk about my most recent essay on Video Game Worker Unions and Revolution, I'd love to see you there!

notesfrombelow.org/article/vide...

6pm at Broadside in Glasgow!
Broadside & Variant Notes from Below Pictures of the cover art for the Notes from Below issue called Dispassions: Class Struggle in Arts & Culture. Issue Launch & Discussion 25.10.25 6pm Boradside 123 Allison St Glasgow
October 23, 2025 at 7:29 PM
austinkelmore.com
I'm unsuccessfully trying to slim down the number books I'm thinking of taking on vacation next week.

Have any of you read some of these? Are any of these books a must-read?
13 books in a stack 1. Five Ways to Forgiveness - Ursula K Le Guin 2. Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist - Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner 3. Angela Y. Davis: An Autobiography 4. Occupation: Organizer - Clement Petitjean 5. Inside Mercedes F1 - Matt Whyman 6. Living for Change: Boggs 7. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin 8. Steering the Craft - Ursula K Le Guin 9. What It Takes To Heal - Prentis Hemphill 10. Overcoming Burnout - Nicole Rose 11. Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle For Housing - Kurwa 12: Rules To Win By - McAlevey & Lawlor 13: Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision - Barbara Ransby
September 27, 2025 at 3:48 PM
austinkelmore.com
I went to the anarchist book fair in London yesterday and only bought one book!

Was it restraint? Or was it that I already had many of the books I saw? Who can say.
An image of an illustrated skeletal rib cage with flowers and plants growing out of it. The book is titled OVERCOMING BURNOUT by NICOLE ROSE. OVERCOMING BURNOUT Organising with others for human, animal and earth liberation can be one of the most empowering experiences alive. Yet frontline resistance comes with risks to our physical and emotional health that can lead many people to burn out and abandon social movements altogether. This book is about overcoming burnout, linking the author's journey of recovery with wider systemic forces such as classism, sexism and power dynamics in groups, poverty, chronic illness and ableism, as well as grief and tauma from prison and state repression. It is a call for models of mutual aid and collective care. Simultaneously deeply personal and acutely political, for anyone involved in grassroots organising. It is a must read. "For communities resisting oppression, burnout is ever-present. Nicole's incredibly important writing calls on us to create a cultural shift, to do the work needed to understand burnout better and to show up for those in our communities most affected by oppression." - Kes Otter Lieffe
September 21, 2025 at 8:05 AM
austinkelmore.com
margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/i-cant-tel...
I can’t tell you what’s coming and I can’t tell you that it’ll be okay but I also, really, really can’t tell you that “everything is fucked” or anything like that. I can only tell you that the future will be determined by our actions. One problem with the current electoral system in this country is that we grow up being told that the only way we can make our voice heard is by voting for representatives to various levels of government, but history isn’t written by voters. It’s written by people taking action. In particular, though not exclusively, history is written by people taking collective action.
September 18, 2025 at 7:14 AM
austinkelmore.com
This is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking, and insightful books I have read in a long, long time.

It has transformed how I think of the world and I will be thinking about what I've learned for years to come.
The book Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd. Zionism is the leading cause of death in occupied palestine, through both direct, state-sanctioned violence and indirect, consequential violence, which trickles down through suffocating bureaucracies, inescapable psychological onslaughts, and impetuous intercommunal conflicts. Yet this man-made quietus is treated like any other leading cause of death - heart disease in the US, dementia in England - and is scarcely cause for concern, let alone condemnation. On the contrary, our death is sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are. Our blood is the price of the colony's sense of "security." The empire cuts the lives of our loved ones short to prolong its reign. And our grief is negligible, our rage unwarranted. The more our loved ones are killed by Zionist colonialism, the less space we are offered to grieve them. We cannot narrate this colossal theft of life, let alone avenge it. Our enemies employ what Mourid Barghouti calls "a simple linguistic trick" to turn the world on its head: they fail to mention what came first and start their story from "secondly." "Start your story with 'secondly,'" Barghouti writes, "and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals, and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with 'secondly' for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous" as opposed to justified or even admirable. The peril of this supposedly inconsequential language game is revealed in its ability to obscure reality. However, more importantly, language possesses a transformative potential to elucidate, demystify, repair, liberate, and rival; to infiltrate consciousnesses and permeate into collective action; to "support the weight of a civilization." Language, if we can dominate it, can turn our anonymous whispers back into thunderous declarations.
September 16, 2025 at 8:22 AM
austinkelmore.com
Maybe this'll cheer you up a bit.
An orange cat sitting in a cubby next to a stack of books with the top one being PEOPLE POWER CHANGE: Organizing for Democratic Renewal by Marshall Ganz.
September 16, 2025 at 7:40 AM
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I am excited to read these.
Four books on top of each other: 1. Necessary Trouble by Sarah Jaffe 2. Living for Change by Grace Lee Boggs 3. Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing by Rahim Kurwa 4. In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James & Grace Lee Boggs by Stephen M. Ward
September 13, 2025 at 2:41 PM
austinkelmore.com
It's so cool to see my name printed in a book. Just absolutely over the moon from this.
A picture of a book printed by Notes From Below called Dispassions: Class Struggle in Arts & Culture. Storm the Palace of Art. The Contents page. 10 | Editorial: Making A Scene in Arts & Culture - Notes From Below 20 | Video Game Worker Unions and Revolution - Austin Kelmore 29 | Comedy of Errors: Work and Organising in a Theatre - Jez 34 | Mere Shells: Fighting Outsourcing in France's Museums - Valentin J. & Ethel L. 41 | Cultures En Luttes - Louise Heritier 46 | Organising Workers for Palestine in Culture - Allan Struthers 62 | Fighting Against Redundancies at the Tate - Cristina Petrella
September 5, 2025 at 11:13 AM
austinkelmore.com
Lazy weekend energy. They don't even pay rent!
Two orange cats in one cat bed. The one on top has his back paws stretched all over the one underneath.
August 25, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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When we created the IWGB Game Workers six months later, we knew we didn’t want to run our branch the same way executives run the companies we work for. However, knowing we didn’t want to perpetuate the hierarchical and exploitative ways we’ve experienced is very different from choosing more liberatory ways of working together. We experimented over and over and over again to find out what worked, iterate on what didn’t, and slowly trended in the direction we wanted. In most of the game companies we work for, there is a small group that makes all the decisions, sometimes with consultation with the rest of the workers, but most often not. A common desire for people in the games industry is to aspire to be promoted into those groups so they can finally make the ‘right’ decisions instead of the ones they disagree with. In the union, we intentionally moved away from that kind of decision making, which was not easy to do.
August 22, 2025 at 9:31 AM
austinkelmore.com
Went climbing this evening and saw this moody teenager on the way home.
A calico cat looking straight at the camera next to grass and a sandstone tenement.
August 13, 2025 at 8:57 PM
austinkelmore.com
I let some of the artichokes I'm growing in the garden bloom, and the bumble butts have taken to sleeping in the radiant purple thistles that come up.

We saw five bumble butts in one artichoke once!
A radiant purple thistle coming out of an artichoke. One chonky bumble bee is sleeping inside of it.
August 12, 2025 at 12:10 PM
austinkelmore.com
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.
A white and orange cat paw with adorable pink toe beans.
August 6, 2025 at 10:26 AM
austinkelmore.com
I'm in London this weekend so swung by the @iwgbunion.bsky.social office to work out of it for a bit.

I get so much energy from being around others helping to make things better for workers across the UK.
A giant red banner that says IWGB: Putting Workers First with pictures below it of demonstrations and strikes. A green banner with the IWGB logo all around it and SOLIDARITY in the middle.
August 1, 2025 at 2:01 PM
austinkelmore.com
Got a new shipment of books from @haymarketbooks.org.

Already started Perfect Victims, and it's gooooood.
3 books right next to each other. Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen & Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept (Revised and Updated Edition) by Pinko Collective Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd
July 29, 2025 at 11:24 AM
austinkelmore.com
Today was a pretty chill day.
Me sitting on a bright yellow couch holding a playstation controller and looking away from the camera. Two orange cats are sprawled out next to me passed the fuck out.
July 26, 2025 at 7:42 PM
austinkelmore.com
Brothers and best friends.
Jameson and Tigger, two orange cats sitting in one cat bed together. Both their heads are right next to each other and Jameson's foot is on top of Tigger.
July 25, 2025 at 7:51 PM
austinkelmore.com
Someone asked me why game workers haven't unionized if our conditions are so bad. These charts are why.

We have collectively lost the knowledge, skill, and willingness to organize and strike. We have to rebuild those, and that takes time.
A bar chart titled Number of workers striking by year. The Screen Actors Guild was formed in 1933 amid lots of strikes before it and even more after it formed. Game Workers Started Organizing in 2017 where previously there were relatively few strikes for decades prior. A graph of Union Membership in the United States from 1960-2020. It goes from 30% in 1960 to 10% in 2020. Bar chart of Percent of Union Election Campaigns with an Illegal Firing. It's 5% in 1951 to 26% in 2007. A bar chart with the title Is Ronald Regan to Blame? No has zero. Yes has 100.
July 15, 2025 at 7:49 AM
austinkelmore.com
Mike says he doesn't have an answer for what to do about the current state of the games industry, but I have one that will help.
Sally Field playing the main character in the movie Norma Rae holding up a sign with UNION scrawled on it.
July 14, 2025 at 3:51 PM
austinkelmore.com
I mean, come on.
Two orange cats on a white bedspread looking adorable as fuck.
July 1, 2025 at 5:03 PM
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When talking to her son about finding a way to survive while under the boot of the empire, she explains, “All we have is us.” She’s reminding him that no one else is coming to save us, and if someone is going to fix the situation we find ourselves in, it has to be us. Not an elected official. Not some magical savior. The people in the room. Us. You. Me. Us. It's both a daunting and liberating thought because it’s a lot of work, but the good news is that we don't need to wait for permission to start.
June 17, 2025 at 3:15 PM
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This is legit what I feel like when helping others through redundancies in the games industry.

I'm working to prevent them from happening, but that's a MUCH longer project with the union work I'm doing.

Oh ya, JOIN A UNION. It's the only way we push back on this industry's bullshit.
Two men with nooses around their necks. One of them looking at the camera with a half smirk. The text at the bottom reads "First time?"
June 12, 2025 at 12:14 PM